In the “Utilities and Government” breakout session on Media Day at the Bentley “Year in Infrastructure 2014” event held in London last week, a number of Bentley executives spoke on various aspects of utilities and government, with new developments for 3D cities.
Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2014 Conference, London
The event showcases work being done with Bentley Systems’ software, with presentations by all the Be Inspired Award finalists for the year, topped off by a gala Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening.
Cyndi Smith, senior director of Application Advantage at Bentley, introduced speakers. Aidan Mercer, senior industry marketing manager for Government spoke on “Advancements in Government and Life cycle Management of Infrastructure.” He also spoke about “Advanced BIM for cities,” which includes the various BIM levels used in 3D cities: Level 1: 3D visualization and design; Level 2: performance improvements; Level 3: extending into the operations at the complete asset level and this contributes to a smarter city. He mentioned a really excited finalist in the BE Awards this year, the City of Eindhoven, a city that uses MicroStation, Descartes, ProjectWise, and Navigator in its development of new city infrastructure.
Know What’s Underground
Rachel Rogers, Applications Advantage for Civil, Geospatial, Hydraulics and Hydrology, announced Bentley Subsurface Utility Design and Analysis in OpenRoads will be available in early 2015, and will be a game changer in terms of knowing what’s underground.
The product automatically creates a 3D model and brings together the information needed, provides 3D modeling of all underground utilities, that you can readily update into your GIS database. This gives you a true picture of what’s underground.
One of the highlights is that you have visualization clash detection which can drive construction costs down.
Utility Industry with Cyndi Smith
An industry trend seen recently: convergence. “With the convergence of information technology and operations technology, some projects I’m seeing are bringing in engineering technology,” said Smith.
Better utilities performance catalyzed by:
- Drivers and enablers
- Smarter networks and technology
- Regulations
- Economic factors
- Organizational evolution
- Results better performing utilities infrastructure
American Electric Power (BE Inspired Award winners in the category Advancing Asset Lifecycle Information Management) are using Bentley AssetWise and Bentley Substation to deploy across 11 states, with a transmission network that runs all over the U.S. They use AssetWise in a number of ways, to create their Work Management Systems, create correlation of work orders and object within a design, and allow objects in the design to visually depict their status inside Bentley Substation.
Time Warner Cable, the largest cable TV company in North America (also the BE Award winner in the category Innovation in Utilities and Communications Networks), had 32 different design centers doing design and fiber network in North America, created six engineering hubs, where everyone is designing into these six servers. Network assets are in the GIS in Oracle Spatial and are available to all their operations support systems. They have achieved a first year ROI of 40% and they project 121% over the next 3 years.
Bentley Map and OpenUtilities
Francois Valois, product management, Bentley Map and OpenUtilities, talked about the new release of Bentley Map that brings “information mobility to the forefront with expanded interoperability.”
Bentley Map is a powerful 2D/3D GIS and mapping software. It includes interoperability, mapping 3D modeling , terrain modeling, point cloud processing embedding with advanced point cloud processing.
Engineering and geospatial information is unified in Bentley Map. Included:
- Enhanced interoperability with Esri’s File Geodatabase, without the need for an Esri license.
- Interoperability with Oracle 12C, the latest release of the Oracle Spatial database, and also support Oracle Spatial Textures for 3D city models, and their new Spiral support for information mobility.
- CityGML added texture support, and can add full blown 3D city models that are shared.
- Enabled Bing Maps support, can procure Bing Map account and leverage that in Bentley products.
- Advanced point cloud processing so users can create geospatial assets directly from point clouds.
- Dynamic cartographic representations
The new release of Bentley Map Mobile improves productivity with redlining and speedy dataset updates. It is a geospatial application that gives you fast access to geospatial data in the field. You can locate assets based on a query of GPS location.
Bentley Map Mobile supports vector geometry attribute and raster backups for large datasets. It also supports iOS, Android and the upcoming Windows platform.
A key announcement is that of the new OpenUtilities products for streamlined design and management of utility networks.
What is OpenUtilities? OpenUtilities is standalone multi-utility GIS and modeling for electric, gas, water and wastewater. This means that it includes MicroStation and Bentley Map, WaterCAD and SewerCAD and supports SysNet. “Our data can be stored in SQL Server Spatial or Oracle Spatial, so people can access the data from any other geospatial package,” said Valois. OpenUtilities Map comes as a suite and is easy to adopt.
(to be continued)
